Living Theology in
the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 8, Number 3
Fall 2003
Reclaiming Lament
Four Questions on Lamentation:
Lament and Nostalgia
Gabriel Jay Rochelle
I. We lament
death. We grieve and we mourn. “Blessed are
those who mourn,” said Jesus, “for they shall be comforted.” In this beatitude many people take
refuge. I have heard people call this
the principal beatitude of their lives.
What are we lamenting? We lament death. Death
means change. Death disrupts what we
have come to call the normal flow of our lives. Most of us derive peace from order, from having the furniture of
our universe in place and nailed down.
When others in our sphere of acquaintance or influence die, we
experience radical change.
When major public figures die, our world is
shattered. Ask those who were around
when President Kennedy was assassinated, or Bobby or Martin Luther King
Jr. People can name the places where
they were, what they were doing, and whom they were with when the news came. We have a deep and timeless sense that we
have been savaged, that pieces of our own lives were ripped from us.
Closer to every adult’s experience is September 11,
2001. 9-11 has entered American
mythology as a number whose very naming brings with it a host of memories of a
loss so overwhelming that we cannot make sense of it.
We lament when the fabric of our universe is torn,
which is an ancient experience – not limited to Christians at all but universal
in scope. The Anglo-Saxons called it
the web of wyrd, for example, by which they meant the invisible fibers that
weave us together with others into a structure that moves through time. We feel a hole in the fabric when some
person or institution or social contract dies.
We lament the irreplaceable nature of the person or contract we have
lost.
• Is this
the nature of our lament?
II. In the Bible, the dirge form of poetry
characterizes lament. Hebrew poetry
is metric, and the dirge is three beats to two, so that it sounds like a person
who shuffles or drags one foot in sorrow.
The dirge usually begins with the word eikah, the Hebrew for
“how,” as in “How could you let this happen?”
We lament our tribulations before the presence of
God. God is the one whom we importune
for an answer in a time of lamentation.
The Lamentations of Jeremiah provide a good example; here the
poet/prophet laments the destruction of Judah and the people’s entry into exile
in Babylon.
The prophets use the dirge form to accuse the people
of sin, but many lamentations are free of judgment and condemnation. The poet laments the drastic nature of the
situation, not the reasons. In these
texts God is portrayed as both Judge and Redeemer, a stance worthy of
remembrance and emulation in our own times of lamentation. When MLK was gunned down in Memphis, many
people thought God was absent, but the inscription on his tomb reflects another
angle of vision: “Free at last, Free at
last! Thank God Almighty I’m free at
last!”
We turn to lament when either our perceptions or our
beliefs (perhaps both) about what God is up to in the world are dramatically
challenged. Lament is a blunt way to
ask what God is doing in the world! It
is the sanctification of the question, “How could this happen?”
I used to wonder why lamentation had virtually disappeared
from the Christian script. I am no
longer as sure as I once was about my initial belief; namely, that in the light
of the resurrection we are to be happy because death is overcome and,
therefore, lament is out of place. In
his award-winning series on the Civil War, for example, the documentary
producer Ken Burns showed that common foot soldiers could be eloquent, both in
describing their belief in God’s providence and in lamenting the bitter sadness
and awful destruction in which they were engaged.
Note the symbiosis involved here: in order to lament,
at least in any biblical sense of the word, one has to turn to God. You must believe in God as the stability at
the heart of the universe, so that when stability is threatened or challenged,
lament arises in the heart. Where there
is no sense of God’s providence, there will be no grounds for lamentation. If we have no sense of God’s providence, we
will expect the universe to act in a capricious and unpredictable manner, and
maybe even that it will always turn for the worst. This is the condition of humanity without God. It is also a description of the nihilism of
our age.
• Does
our lament stem from our faithfulness?
III. What
lament remains in a godless age takes the form of nostalgia for a time when faith in God gave meaning and purpose
to life. Nihilism destroys our sense
that life has meaning and purpose. We
seem to be “riders on the storm” as The Doors sang in 1971: “into this world
we’re thrown, like an actor out on loan, like a dog without a bone.” People cling to stability, therefore, like a
raft in the storm of their lives, not because they feel a genuine sense of
loss.
Christians may still lament because the message of the
resurrection is, among things, the overturning of death; and when death seems
to gain the upper hand we are thrown into lamentation. Most people, I suspect, lament the lost days
when the presence of God was a guarantee for the meaningfulness of life – even
if they are not aware of the content of or reason for their lamentation.
• Are we
are engaged in lament or are we simply stuck in the ennui that overtakes most
people in this nihilistic age?
IV. Finally,
could lament in the churches today be the external expression of
nostalgia? Could it be that we feel and respond to our inner sense of
deprivation rather than to genuine loss, which is separable from us? That is,
could it be that people who are deeply affected by the nihilism of the age are
seeking to halt change on selfish grounds?
Many people look to the churches as bastions of
conservation if not conservatism. That
is to say, people look to the church to hold the line on certain societal mores
and customs. Churches change very
slowly, we are told, because they are essentially conserving institutions. But what happens when the conserving
institution becomes the agent of change?
What would happen if, in the words of Dr. King, the church suddenly became
the headlight rather than the taillight on the vehicle of society?
This is a
minefield. Be careful. The questions are, “By what criteria is this
change wrought? What warrant is there
for it to happen?” We don’t want to
adopt a knee-jerk response of “I see the church is changing. I’m against it.” But we want to make sober decisions.
Much change has been wrought for good. The churches’ support of the civil rights
movement was essential to its universal appeal only forty short years ago. By the same token, whatever you might feel
about it, the churches were in the forefront of dialogue about the war in
Vietnam. And, lest we forget more
recent history, the peace movement born in East German churches flourished into
the eventual destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
We cannot discuss specific issues. This article is on lament. But everyone involved in today’s church
struggles must look in the mirror and ask questions.
• Do I
hold to the faith that Christ has overcome the world?
• Am I
fighting solely because I see my world crumbling and former stabilities are
lost?
• Do I
have sufficient grounds in my faith for my support or opposition to such
changes?
• Is my
lament grounded in nostalgia or in faithfulness?
Gabriel Jay Rochelle
St. Sophia Orthodox Seminary, New Jersey
Pull quotes:
We lament when the fabric of our universe is torn,
which is an ancient experience – not limited to Christians at all but universal
in scope.
We turn to lament when either our perceptions or our
beliefs about what God is up to in the world are dramatically challenged.
Are we are engaged in lament or are we simply stuck in
the ennui that overtakes most people in this nihilistic age?